Rain With a Brief Beach Break

It was not supposed to start raining until late morning today, so I had planned to get up early and sneak in a morning beach walk.  No such luck...darn Weatherbug!   The alarm went off and I could hear the rain through the open sliding door.  I considered getting up, but thought better of it and rolled over to go back to sleep.  I actually didn't sleep much more.  Fruit, toast, and coffee for breakfast.

I ended up sitting around and watching some TV for awhile.  Just when I was considering getting dressed and going out...big old thunderstorm.  Sat around a bit more then I headed out around lunchtime.  I hit Seawall and went west.  I found a deli and picked up a sandwich, then headed out to figure out where I could picnic.  I ended up at the west end of the island and made an illegal U-turn (on a deserted road) before I went over the toll bridge.  On the way back, the sun started peaking out and I looked for beach access with parking.   I found it and there were only two other cars there.

Put on the beach shoes, packed the sandwich and a bottle of water in my backpack and grabbed the camera...and I was off...to a deserted beach

Just me and a bunch of birds...so I decided to take some photos of the wildlife.

I believe these are some variety of Terns, I must do research...

Here we have a small flock of what I'm pretty sure are sandpipers

This is definitely a brown pelican flying over my head.

I also stirred up a flock of terns (not quite as cool as a flock of seagulls).

I then found a place to sit down and eat my sandwich.  Just sat for a bit and enjoyed the scenery and the fact that I had a whole entire beach all to myself.  One thing I did notice is a decided lack of seashells.  I need to find a good shelling beach!  Headed back to the car just as more people started arriving at the beach.

I continued east, until I hit a cheezy beach shop and stopped to buy some tacky beach junk.  That took all of 10 minutes. Kept going east until I got to the very end of the island.  Found a parking spot and watched some ships exit Galveston Bay.

That was fun for a bit, until I headed back west again.  More tourist junk shops...then I was hungry for dinner (yes, this shopping and wandering about actually took several hours).  I remember seeing the Olympia Grill when driving up and down Seawall...so I decided to give it a try.

I decided to pair the Vilana white wine from Crete with the Baked Shrimp Pasta special

It was a TON of food and very yummy. Those toasted looking lumps under there are the shrimp and the cheese is mostly feta.  The wine was awesome too.  I could only finish half of my dinner and it's in my fridge now.   Somehow, I found room for desert.

They had four deserts to choose from and for those of us unable to make up our minds...the desert sampler plate!  Baklava, a warm moist chocolate cake with some sort of booze in it, a very cinnamon-y bread pudding and a galaktoboureko.  It's that thing in front which is a custard on filo which was awesome in it's deliciousness. 

So, I'm sitting on the couch barely able to move in a pair of stretchy pants now.  

Gonna try to do that morning beach thing tomorrow!